Organizational Management

In the best-selling tradition of Liar's Poker comes a devastatingly accurate and darkly hilarious behind-the-scenes look at the wonderful world of management consulting.

How many people does the ideal team contain? How do groups bond, earn trust and forge shared identities? How can leaders build environments adaptable enough to respond to shocks and still enable people to thrive together? How can you feel close to people if your only point of contact is a phone or a computer? In The Social Brain leading experts from the worlds of evolutionary psychology and business management come together to offer a primer on great team working. They explain what size groups work and how to shape them according to the nature of the task at hand.

This guide shows listeners how to transform a traditional organization into an evolutionary one with a framework and mindset that offer a new way of leading and approaching change.

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

In How to Kill a Unicorn, Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm, and offers inside accounts of how they solved their biggest challenges. Embedded in their approach to new ideas are hard-earned lessons about what separates innovations that work from those that don’t.

Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change.

Are you a manager who struggles to get accountability within your organization? Have you either bulldozed your way through an encounter or talked yourself out of it with excuses like “I’ve already tried that” or “it’s too risky”? If you’ve ever done a poor job of holding others accountable, this audiobook can help you feel more comfortable gaining ownership from employees. Own Up! addresses the big myths, everyday hesitations, and all the other stories we tell ourselves about what it means and how much time and effort it takes to create a culture of responsibility.

When it comes to running a business, the most important decisions a leader makes are not about products or locations - they're about people. For the past 33 years, Dee Ann Turner has been recruiting, training, and retaining some of the best employees in the restaurant business. Now she's ready to share her secrets on how to build, sustain, and grow an organizational culture that attracts world-class talent and consistently delights customers, no matter what your industry.

Real wages have stagnated or declined for most workers, job insecurity has increased, and retirement income is uncertain. Why have jobs gotten so much worse? As Peter Cappelli argues, these issues and others stem from the logic of financial accounting and its fundamental flaws in dealing with human capital. Financial accounting views employee costs as fixed costs that cannot be reduced and fails to account for the costs of bad employees and poor management. The simple goal of today's executives is to drive down employment costs, even if it raises costs elsewhere.

Over six years, long-time Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger was invited by some of the greatest companies in the world to speak about the habits of high-performing individuals. From Microsoft and Starbucks to the New England Patriots and San Antonio Spurs, what do some organizations do seemingly better than most of their opponents? Don identified 16 habits that drive high-performing teams. Building on stories, examples, and first-hand accounts, each chapter in Great Teams comes with applicable examples on how to apply these characteristics in any organization.

Many employees now show up for work not just to do their jobs but also to discover, debate, and digest important social issues. A growing number of workers want to have an impact in the world, and their preferences are a prompt for employers to be more mindful of the role of business in driving societal change, starting with what people experience at work.

High performance has always required shrewd strategy and superb execution. But Rich Karlgaard - Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director - takes a surprising turn and argues that there is now a third element that's required for competitive advantage - your company's values. Karlgaard examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common; all have leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth as well as weather hard times.

Business Ethics for Better Behavior concisely answers the three most pressing ethical questions business professionals face: What makes business practices right or wrong? Why do normal, decent businesspeople of good will sometimes do the wrong thing? And how can we use the answer to these questions to get ourselves, our coworkers, our bosses, and our employees to behave better?

It’s undeniable that we’re entering a new era of remote work. While many leaders seek to run business as usual, why settle for the usual when remote teams allow us to work even better? The research shows that employees are more productive and engaged when they have the freedom to work from anywhere.

As consumers we intuitively understand the benefits of being decoded. Google amazes us by generating answers before we’ve even finished asking a question. The Decoded Company distills how this process works into three transformative ideas. Technology Can be a Coach, personalizing processes to the individual based on experience and offering training interventions precisely at the teachable moment.

In her newest book, Be Bad First, Erika explores how we can become masters of mastery; proficient in the kind of high-payoff learning that's needed today. She encourages listeners to embrace being bad on the way to being great - to be novices over and over again as we seek to learn and acquire the new skills that will allow us to thrive in this fast-changing world.

The "Step Up, Step Back" approach suggests leaders need to step up and do more than they typically do in the early stages of the change - in specific ways and at specific times; and then step back and do less than they typically do in the later stages of the change - again, in specific ways, at specific times. The result is not only change that sticks, but empowered, motivated managers who can get on with delivering change, without needing ongoing input or cover from leaders.

Nolan Bushnell founded the groundbreaking gaming company Atari, the restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese's, and two dozen other companies. He also launched Steve Jobs' career, along with those of many other brilliant creatives over the course of his five decades in business. In his eagerly awaited first book, Bushnell explains how to find, hire, and nurture the people who could turn your company into the next Atari or the next Apple.

Going beyond high performance is more than just processes and tools. The underlying “glad to be here” mindset is at the core of everything Foley teaches. With this foundation in place, any individual or team looking to achieve greatness can easily understand and implement the author’s tools and processes. Filled with lessons from his days as a Blue Angel and a leadership expert training Fortune 500 companies, this audiobook includes proven blueprints for how to lead through change, achieve dynamic focus, execute with high trust, and much more.

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it.